French rulers deemed African societies too backward for direct application of French law

Evidence

However, French conquest had proceeded at such a pace that, by the turn of the century, it was generally agreed that French law neither could nor should be applied wholesale to the ethnically diverse and “backward” societies in the rest of the colony. The question then arose of how best to organize a system of African justice that upheld the principles of customary law while still being controlled by the colonizer. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 303

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to how the republican idea of empire was forced into West Africa through a dual legal system.